Love & Passion Quote by Fran Lebowitz

Lebowitz turns a minefield into a punchline by treating a taboo subject with the driest possible premise: not moral panic, not earnest guidance, just conversational efficiency. The joke hinges on a deliberate category error. You expect “Don’t talk to kids about sex” to be the prudish warning. She flips it into “Don’t talk about sex with kids” because they’re boring conversationalists. That switch is the whole mechanism: it punctures the sanctimony around sex education by dragging it into the realm of everyday adult impatience.

The intent is less to argue against sex education than to mock the adult habit of making everything about their own discomfort while pretending it’s about children’s innocence. Her line implies that adults don’t actually fear corrupting kids; they fear awkwardness, loss of control, and being forced into sincerity. So she reframes the “appropriate” stance as a matter of taste: children “rarely have anything to add.” It’s a cruelly funny way of saying, Relax, you’re not on the brink of societal collapse; you’re just stuck talking to someone with no material.

Context matters: Lebowitz’s persona is the urbane curmudgeon, a professional skeptic of polite hypocrisies. Coming out of late-20th-century New York commentary, her humor targets the performance of decency as much as decency itself. Under the laugh is a sharper observation: adults often invoke children as moral shields, and Lebowitz refuses the shield, insisting on the real motive - adult vanity and boredom.